


The Secrets At The Quick of Me

by Tomboy13



Category: The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Bullying, Coming Out, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 12:12:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16534334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tomboy13/pseuds/Tomboy13
Summary: A teenage Theo reflects on her secrets.Feelings heavy, horror light.





	The Secrets At The Quick of Me

“Why are you so fucking damaged?”

She’d asked herself that before, in various ways. She’d written it large into her core with booze and drugs, with casual flings that she didn’t really want and forceful kisses she didn’t feel she could refuse, acts that had only meant that she’d swallowed others secrets to hide along with her own. She’d never got a decent answer.

Theo leaned back on the rotten wooden bench, laying her head against the flakey boards with their peeling green paint that would absolutely litter her hair when she could finally bring herself to stand. She could feel the broken bench sticking into her thighs that were spread comfortably wide. She had never felt the need to compensate for her own femininity.

With her eyes closed, the sunlight falling through the leaf-heavy branches of the oak tree above was a water dance; it flashed against her eyelids red and blue and green, matching the seething mess underneath.

“Why are you so damaged?” The woman whispered to herself again. It wasn’t an easy answer.

For her siblings, it was relatively simple to pinpoint. The house had broken them all in their own way. For each of them, there were moments you could lay a finger on and say “this is it; this is thing that tore you”. 

For Theo, the house had been a secondary horror, coming close on the heels of her own burgeoning sexuality and the cluster-fuck surprise of her ‘gift’.

She snorted at that, pressing both hands over her still shut eyes. Some gift, to feel with a touch the dark and dirty secrets that everyone held in the pit of their guts. To know just from a brush of her skin the stains and scars that littered the world’s surfaces like filthy grease. To feel every single second. Her mother had seemed proud of it, had likened it to her own sensitivities, but then Olivia Crain had been chewed up and spat out and left irreparably broken before they could properly discuss it, and Theo, too young to unravel it all, had been unable to stop the subconscious link forming between her mother’s death and the curse that they shared.

The peculiar thing was that both of her secrets were polar opposites. The touch was cold; it spread glacier slow as ice inwards from her skin, from a finger tip, from her lips, numbing and paralysing her muscles and her lungs until all she could do was choke on the panic and feel everything; see everything. It felt like freezing to death in other people’s misery. The desire she felt for women, though - that was hot. It boiled and swamped in the very core of her, electrifying her nerve endings at a touch, or a special look. Under the right conditions, Theo Crain was quite sure it would consume her entirely, leaving nothing behind but ash. 

Somewhere under the confusion, dancing at the back of her subconscious, was a thought that if she could just find a way to balance the two, maybe it would be ok. Maybe she would be ok.

“What are the gloves for?”

Theo cracked one blue eye open. The boy in front of her was her own age - 18 or maybe a little older, with the same mousy brown buzzcut that her brother Steve had as a teenager. He was smirking, his hands on his hips, an unkind look in his uninteresting eyes. The empath decided that she disliked him on principle.

“I said, what are the gloves for, freak?” The man repeated, leaning forwards slightly to tower over the prone young woman in front of him.

Theo closed her eye again. “They’re for fucking your mother. We’re both passionate about safe sex.”

It was childish, and silly, and by the time she got back to her aunt Janet’s the pink handprint around her wrist was starting to fade, but she could still feel the spit trickling down her face, still hear the slurs and the barely veiled threats as he’d dragged her around the park for his friend’s amusement. The anger still sat in her throat, the shame, but she was becoming adept at dealing with those feelings - at squashing them down inside, until she could pretend they were gone entirely.

It was around the third glass of wine that the knock on the door had come. She’d stumbled slightly on her way down the stairs, her young body unable to handle the amount of drink that her grown-up self would come to imbibe as an entrée. At the back of her mind, she was glad that aunt Janet had choir on Thursdays, that Nellie and Luke were staying at a friend’s house; she had no desire to become the family fuck up; couldn’t handle them seeing her like this with their questions and concerns and understanding.

The feeling of tears at the back of her throat was unexpected, and she wrenched the front door open more forcibly than she had intended.

“Theo!” The girl on the other side of the door was platinum blonde, with hair cut short and gelled a little too much on the greasy side. She had one hand raised and a look of shock on her face, pink lips forming a surprised ‘O’. Inside the brunette’s belly, the embers began to smoke.

“Ch-Chloe! What are you doing here?”

Chloe grinned a half smile, muscular arms folding across the Marilyn Manson tank top she was wearing. Theo followed her gaze to the floor where the other woman was scuffing the sole of her purple Doc Marten on the shabby welcome mat. “I heard what happened. With Dave.”

“Dave.” Theo said without feeling. So that was the cretin’s name.

“He’s a dick. I wish I’d have been there, I’d have kicked his ass.”

Theo swallowed thickly at the image this conjured in her mind; the butch taking out her tormentors one by one; of Theo playing the damsel in distress for once in her life. It hit her how very much she wanted that at that moment - desperately wanted to be the protected rather than the protector. The realisation made the wish sour before her eyes, and the middle Crain reminded herself that she wasn’t allowed that privilege; had denied it for herself since she was 12 years old, being comforted by her older sister because they thought that she’d let go of Nellie’s hand in the darkness. 

“Yeah. It was no big deal.”

Chloe nodded slowly, just once, her brown eyes never leaving Theo’s face. “Do you want to hang out some?”

Theo glanced behind her into the dark hallway, where the ghosts of her secrets lay in wait, and stepped aside. “That would be nice.”

She tried hard not to stare as her friend took the stairs two at a time up to the over-full bedroom that she had shared with both sisters until last month, when Shirley moved out, and that is now decidedly more cramped as the two remaining girls expanded to fill the extra space. Closing the door with a sigh, trying to pretend she didn’t notice the way the other woman’s glutes moved under the cheap thin combat shorts, Theo trailed after her.

An hour later, and they’d drunk every drop of wine in the house, smoked two cigarettes out of the window with a towel rolled up under the door, and found themselves lain out on Theo’s bed, legs entwined. 

“Why am I so damaged?” 

The dark haired woman didn’t realise she’d asked out loud until Chloe propped herself up on one elbow, pushing Theo’s hands apart where the empath had been playing with a loose strand of cotton fraying from her glove.

“Who told you you’re damaged? Did Dave say that?”

Theo shook her head, desperately wishing she could tear her eyes away from Chloe’s glassy gaze. “I just...I know I am. But I don’t know why, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

Chloe blinked, reaching out to touch Theo’s cheek, but stopping with an inch to spare, hesitating, remembering perhaps her friend’s aversion to skin-to-skin contact. “You can’t fix it because you aren’t damaged, Theo Crain.”

“I think I’m gay.” Theo blurted, jamming a hand over her mouth in horror as soon as the words escaped.

The blonde laughed. “Well, despite what some people might think, it’s 1998, not 1958. There’s nothing wrong with being gay, Theo.” Chloe bit her lip. “I’m gay. That’s not...there’s nothing...wrong with it.”

Their eyes fought for purchase, scrabbling across each other’s faces to find the unspoken words that might be hidden there.

“I...I see things.” Theo whispered.

Chloe let her hand fall onto the bedspread next to Theo’s head, fingers scratching at the material. “Bad things?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you see them now?” 

Theo shook her head, not able to break eye contact with the woman hovering over her. “I see them through touch. If I were to touch you or you me, I’d see your secrets.”

Whatever reaction Theo was expecting, it wasn’t for Chloe to blush a deep, blotchy red at the suggestion; she felt her own cheeks warm in sympathy.

“I don’t think I have any. Not any bad ones, at least.” The butch said quietly, her breath ghosting over Theo’s lips so that she could almost taste the red wine and the cheap tobacco.

“I want to find out.” The response came too quick, too eager, driven by the pulsing want in her belly more than rational thought, but the Crain didn’t have time to dwell on her embarrassment before soft, chapped lips were being pressed to her own. 

She tasted trepidation, and nerves, and worry, and smeared across everything else, unbridled joy, and the secrets that came tumbling into her mouth were little bombs of longing, with not a shadow of darkness buried among them.

Balance, she thought absurdly as the kiss broke apart.


End file.
